Will the new airport act as a itunes share

[Aegelward]

I'm just a little curious about this, i'm starting to feel the limitations on my link-station and my router is constantly misbehaving, so the temptation to get one is quite high.

i just found myself wondering, are disc drives attached to the new base station, are media files shared through it with an itunes-like sharing, something like what some of the more recent NAS appliances feature.

The minisite on the apple website seem to imply that files shared by the base station itself were shared with the ?TV but there was no definite answer.

so please, can anyone clear this up? >_>

 

[ChrisA]

so please, can anyone clear this up? >_>

How could anyone who does not work at Apple on the router know more hen what's been published? We can guess. But after the product ships and the user manual is available we will all know.

My guess is that the disks will be shared via "SMB". which is just the same as if a Mac or PC shared a folder.

 

[peterjhill]

The shares will be browsable via bonjour. They will be available to mac and windows clients. Mac clients can auto-mount the volume automatically.

You can attach a usb hub to the airport and attach multiple drives, printers, etc and they will all work.

The way to get the files available via itunes is simple.. you have your files on an external HD connected to the airport via usb.

You then turn off "keep your itunes library organized" and "copy files to your itunes library" or what ever they are called.

Next you add the files to your itunes library. The files stay on the airport connected drive but show up in your library.

I already have over 150 of my personal dvds copied to an external hd. They are all in my itunes library. They all live on an external drive that is only sometimes connected to my mac. Everything works well. If I have a movie on my ipod and sync with the drive disconnected, the movie stays on the ipod..

 

[madmaxmedia]

What Peter says is exactly right- you don't need any special extra functionality to have multiple computers 'share' the songs on an external HD. One extra point- there is a setting for where you want you iTunes library to be stored, for when you import CD's through iTunes. You can have the library on the external HD, if you want your ripped music to be accessible by all computers. Or you can manually copy over the files too.

Here's a question- If I have any external HD that is accessible by multiple computers, can I set the iTunes library to be on the external HD, such that all the computers will literally have the same iTunes collection?

It's not a big deal, but then any change you make on 1 computer would apply to the other ones as well. OTOH, I don't know what happens if 2 computers have iTunes open at the same time, make changes, etc. Maybe your library data will get corrupted, etc.

It might be possible to extend this functionality further in software, but I don't imagine the Airport Express has any extra special features to do so.

 

[peterjhill]

I share the same library with iphoto, that works.. I would guess that it would work for itunes also.. the advantage of having your library on an external drive is that you can ignore file permissions on the drive and not have to use any more complicated things like permisson acls or groups or whatever.. When you library is on the same drive that os x is on, you can't do that and it is much more complicated.

Sad thing is that I literally just bought a linksys AP/router/switch a week before the expo... This is pretty nice funtionality though..

Peter